Tony Robbins' best tip for overcoming the fear of failure is backed by science

Life and business strategist Tony Robbins offers his best advice
for getting over the fear of failure in a recent
Business Insider video.

Whenever Robbins, now the star of a Netflix
documentary titled "I Am Not Your
Guru," is hesitant about doing something that
scares him, he imagines himself at age 85, sitting in his rocking
chair and looking back on his life.

At that point, he asks himself, would he experience greater
regret over having done the scary thing or opted out?

At least in the example he gives in the video — learning to fly a
helicopter — he knows he'd feel better having tried to learn
instead of assuming it would take too much time and energy.

"What if you never learned? What if you came up with all these
fears?" Robbins says. "I look back on my life [at 85] and I
missed out on all of it."

This mental exercise is predicated on the idea that we'll feel
greater remorse over the shots we didn't take than over those we
did take and missed.

As it turns out, this assumption has been the subject of
investigation by psychologists for at least two decades. And it
would seem that Robbins is right — sort of.

In
the long run, we're more likely to regret those chances we missed
out on.zoetnet/Flickr

Research, published in 2011 by Mike Morrison and Neal J.
Roese, yielded similar
findings. While people were just as likely to have regrets
about action and inaction, regrets about inaction involved more
elapsed time than regrets about action.

In other words, asking that guy on a date and getting laughed at
might initially sting more than letting your chance to approach
him pass by. But years later, when you're sitting in your rocking
chair, you're more likely to regret letting him go and wondering
"what if?" than if you'd asked him and been humiliated.

Of course, these findings don't imply that you should or
shouldn't do something you're afraid of failing at — that's for
you to decide. The takeaway here is that the frustration or
embarrassment of trying and failing seems to fade faster than the
pain of missing your chance.

Ultimately, it's about learning that you may have to sit with
negative emotions either way.

As Robbins says about dealing with the looming prospect of
failure, "I don't have to get rid of the fear. I just have to
dance with it."